A Timely Poet

On the page, a sonnet is a compact and highly organized structure. But to read or hear it is to embrace and then modify successive apprehensions of meaning. Each word forces a reconstrual of everything before. Sonnet 129, its first line above, is just one example of this experience of sliding meanings. Taking 129 in slow motion displays the process of understanding, and the frequent second thoughts and doubletakes demanded by a Shakespearean sonnet.

What sort of spirit is this that can be expended? Expending of various sorts could be wasteful and shameful, but what could be a waste of shame?

Lust snaps the preceding line into meaning. It's about ejaculation. Now expectation shifts. The metaphorical expense of spirit in a waste of shame might launch an elaborate conceit: expense could take the speaker toward the imagery of finance, while waste invites other body puns — both are frequent flourishes for Shakespeare. But no, when the topic is lust in action, there's no time for studied imagery. Here's the first quatrain entire:

In line 2, the seeming subject itself suddenly pivots from lust in action, as the speaker is derailed by the sprawling immoral precursors to fornication. The second line, with its nice symmetry, lust in action; and till action, lust careens into an explosion of moral predicates, a riot of alliteration. Lust is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame. Some sounds echo for the length of the line: d and m link the two half lines, but the most potent resonances are contained in the pairs of predicates, perjured, murderous and then bloody, full of blame. After four condemnations, the reader might well expect the speaker to move on, but the outburst continues into the fourth line, with five more descriptors of the runup to lust in action: Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust. Now any ordering of sound collapses, as the line halts through a sprawl of vowels and consonants.

The first quatrain of the poem has defied expectation at least once in every line.¹ Its pyrotechnics may lead the reader to overlook the mystery of its overall sense. Lust is murderous? Bloody? Savage? The speaker is enacting an ejaculation of another sort, a verbal paroxysm of self-blame that distorts the experience he is describing. Moreover, how is this a love sonnet? Even within the form-stretching run of Shakespeare's 154, this is exceptional. The preceding sonnet (How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st), is a light musing on the beloved at the virginal, in which the poet envies the keyboard in its privilege of kissing the beloved's hands. Sonnet 128 traces a musing passion that is flirtatious, coy, restrained, conventional, romantic — 129 is not about this kind of love at all.

Q1 ends with a comma, and the single sentence of Q1 continues into Q2 with Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight. However, the urgency of Q1 has begun to sag, and the topic has shifted. Now the speaker's moral mania has moved to the aftermath of lust in action, in counterpoise to the mad impulse toward sex:

The speaker's thoughts have evolved. The initial fury of self-blame blows over, making space for the simile of bait, and this in turn leads to some generalizations in Q3:

Now the moral morphs into the psychological, as the aftermath of orgasm slides from hated to woe, the language of regret rather than condemnation. But more important, the middle term of the implied narrative, sexual consummation, enters the discussion. It is the swallow'd bait which is also extreme. In lines 11 and 12 the speaker acknowledges that sex is bliss, and as such is regarded prior to the act as a joy, and afterwards as a dream. The couplet makes this creeping awareness into the main point:

So sex is heaven! (Just like you always knew it was.) (And even though you'll feel a hell of guilt a minute later.) All together now:

Helen Vendler writes, "The ethics of lyric writing lies in the accuracy of its representation of inner life, and in that alone." To succeed so well at this, "Shakespeare discovered a newly complex system of expression, unprecedented in the Renaissance lyric, through which he could, accurately and convincingly, represent and enact that arousal and self-loathing…" (Vendler 17) The result is "a fast ride through the psychological universe of passion." (Vendler 17) In these features the sonnet seems to war with philosophy. But does a slingshot trajectory through a universe of passion preclude all reflective thought?

Sonnet 129 enacts its subject, miming the psychological trajectory of sexual consummation, as experienced by a speaker with some serious scruples. Q1 presents a hyperbolic verbal surge, while Q2 expands the aftermath. It's a story of passion first, but not merely that. The sonnet is equally a story of reflection, of a mind adjusting its judgment as time passes. Each quatrain launches a new line of thought, another attempt to say what the speaker perceives. (In fourteen lines the speaker proposes no fewer than twenty-one predicates to describe lust in action.) Q1 then is the initial hypothesis, pushed over the top by guilt or shame. The next two quatrains step back from the first. In its restless reconfigurations, the poem enacts the struggle of thought to make sense of a problem. Each quatrain both expands and refines the terms of the description. The glory of the poem is its success at depicting two struggles, one of feeling and one of thought. Ultimately, the poem represents the passionate and the dispassionate as a single bumpy journey.

Often people think about sex as the successive movement from desire to consummation. Sonnet 129 begins with frantic desire, but expands and modifies its purview. To think about lust philosophically requires, at minimum, the expansion to include a third moment, the aftermath, the past tense had in had, having, and in quest to have. Moreover, the philosophy of sex (and desire overall) needs enough distance to see passion dis-passionately, honestly and without self-deception. Specifically, in the throes of intense desire, one acts under the shroud of various rationalizations and evasions. The entire tradition of love poetry, the tradition from which Shakespeare's sonnets emerge, affords a comprehensive apparatus of seduction. But sentiment is never Shakespeare's way.² This sonnet burns off any romantic cover for fornication.

Philosophy also moves from the particular to the abstract and general, as does 129. The main conclusion seems to be line 10:

Despite its abstractness, extreme is the most specific predicate available to the speaker. Before, during, and after, lust in action is extreme, but its extremity is different in each phase. The examples given support all three faces of extremity. Once the poem is recast as an argument from examples, some other general features of the sonnet make better sense. First, the poem is surprisingly sparse in figurative language. The bait/on purpose laid is its only simile, and heaven and hell its only metaphors. Expense of spirit and waste of shame are arguably metaphorical, but all four nouns had a literal sense appropriate to the speaker's meaning. The sonnet is a poem in sound and rhythm — only. Second, unlike the sonnet tradition and almost every other poem in the sequence, 129 is utterly impersonal. Throughout the sonnets, the emotions in play are explicitly ascribed to the speaker or to an addressee. But 129 features no I, thou, he, she, or even they. This, too, broadens the scope of the generalization. All this the world well knows, because everyone of us has experienced just what the speaker has depicted.

In short, this sonnet has accomplished something extraordinary: Its topic is abstract, and its description remains impersonal, literal, and descriptively general, stripped of individuality, time, and place — philosophy in action. At the same time, the experience being considered is fluid, unstable, and intensely emotional. The sonnet enacts this flux, transfiguring the act of reading into the emotional and reflective groping and grappling with lust in action. Lust and philosophy converge.³

Sonnet 129 invites philosophical reflection, but arguably its reflective flow is just a poetic device. Renaissance writers and readers delighted in the interplay of passion and intellect, sound and sense. Their poetry celebrates wit, wordplay, and paradox. Accordingly, 129 might be demoted from philosophy, instead seen as a typical creation of a cerebral Elizabethan. Fortunately, however, there are clues that Shakespeare did intend the sonnets to enact the process of philosophical reflection in a robust, modern sense. That is, for Shakespeare the sonnets really were an attempt to articulate and solve one or more problems, working out solutions with the support of circumspect evidence, at a very general level. One indicator of intent for the series is the indeterminate personae constructed by the poems. Sonnets 1 through 126 generally address a mysterious young man, while 127 through 152 the notorious "dark lady." (The last two sonnets, dedicated to Cupid, form a short epilogue.) But who are these people? This mystery is the rabbit hole that leads Stephen Booth to call the sonnets "guide posts for a reader's journey to madness" (Booth, x). The originals addressed have never been conclusively identified. And who is speaking? Historically critics have tried to tie the sonnets to the autobiography of Shakespeare, but with slim success.⁴ In sum, the sonnets exhibit a conspicuous referential vagueness.⁵ The series embodies psychological verisimilitude but omits concrete referential details. Dozens of sonnets address the poet's beloved, but you'd never be able to pick him or her out of a police lineup.

Contrast Shakespeare's studied vagueness with the first quatrain of this sonnet, translated from Italian:

"That day" was April 6, 1327, and the Lady in question was (probably) Laura de Noves. The author, of course, is Petrarch. Although the beloved's last name is uncertain, the poems clearly tie to life events of Petrarch and Laura. This is the font from which the sonnet tradition springs. The Elizabethans followed Petrarch's lead, with concrete referents including Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Samuel Daniel's Delia. But not Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's choice begs a central interpretive question. He could have easily created specific personae in the various roles in the tidy constellation of love that is the sonnets. Those persona might have been real, or fictive, but in either case Shakespeare — of all people! — was singularly capable of concrete rendering of his poetic speaker and subjects. But he didn't do it. Why not?

Another cottage industry based in the sonnets is the interpretation of their overall dramatic narrative. Several sonnets seem to describe specific events (e.g., the gift of a blank notebook in 77), and groups of sonnets can be formed around episodes and issues that might occur in a relationship. The speaker and beloved are separated; the speaker worries about the superior verses of rival poets; the beloved is unfaithful; the young man and the dark lady have an affair; and so forth. Yet efforts to read a novel out of the sequence have ultimately failed. The narrative stumbles and digresses. Of course Shakespeare could have assembled a coherent narrative of 14-line episodes, and could have been motivated to do so by the great success of his narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. But he didn't do so. Again, why not?⁶

Shakespeare's motives for referential vagaries will be one of several overarching issues in our consideration of Shakespeare as philosopher. I will ultimately suggest that this choice is rooted in his metaphysics. But for now, we can observe that his evasion of the concrete is equally a preference for the abstract. In this tendency, he has cleared a space for philosophical reflection.

However, unlike most philosophical writing, Shakespeare draws the reader through the process of reflection rather than the product.

Doing philosophy in 14 lines or less is ingenious. Still, the sonnet affords little room for dialectic, not much opportunity to refine definitions, claims, and arguments, or to consider objections and replies. For this we look to the series as a whole. As with each sonnet individually, of the entire sequence we ask, what is this about? An apt subtitle for the collection might be "Love's Problems," and the list of these problems would be long. Indeed, the sonnet tradition is mainly mellifluous whining. Yet there is one overarching problem that is explicit in about a third of the poems and lurking in many others. It is already on the table in the first quatrain of Sonnet 1:

The speaker's first announced intention is to preserve or increase beauty, but the third line introduces the obstacle and principal obsession of the sonnets: Time. Time is even more of an abstraction than lust, but like lust the encounter with time is emotionally fraught, ever shifting, and demanding of relentless reflection. In the poet's mind, time poses a problem of such magnitude that it must be solved; the sonnets offer two proposed solutions.

What then is time in the Sonnets? The medieval dread of time is embodied (or disembodied) through Death. Though Shakespeare was clearly familiar with the tropes and allegorical figuring of Death, and invokes them often, the sonnets shift the problem of Death onto its conveyer, Time. Time snatches up the traditional props of Death, the scythe and knife, and acts as the fearful and intentional opponent not only to life, but also to beauty, memory, and ultimately existence. That is, the unique grim event of dying ramifies in the sonnets into myriad little deaths, everyday corruptions, creeping decay. The adjectives attached to Time are accordingly negative. Time is: never-resting (5), wasteful (15), a bloody tyrant (16, also 115), devouring (19), swift-footed (19), sluttish (55), possessing an injurious hand (63), thievish (77), wasted (106), reckoning (115), and fickle (126).

Again and again, the contemplation of present pleasure is dislodged by an awareness of time's onrush. For example, the poet's chronophobia hijacks one of the Shakespeare's most famous poems, sonnet 18:

The poem opens with a charming complement, including a nice equivocation between mild weather and the virtue of temperance. The imagined scene of speaker and beloved together invites a survey of other fine features of the beloved. You are like a summer's day, rather than, say, a bit of Spring, because:

And you are better than summer in — surprisingly — duration:

That is, summer, like a short-term lease, will expire all too soon. This is an odd metaphor. The opening line announced a comparison between the beloved and a day, but the particular balm of a summer day has been displaced by a more abstract property, its transience. Transience then will occupy the next quatrain entirely:

What began as praise and a celebration of the beloved via the perfect picnic poem has devolved into a big existential worry. Yes, you're fair, my dear, but you aren't going to be fair for long, your fairness declining, untrimmed by chance or the changeable course of nature. As in 129, the speaker has moved from the particular (here, the beloved) to the abstract, fairness (or beauty) in general.

The problem is famously solved in the remaining sestet, beginning:

The beloved turns out to possess a loveliness that will escape time, a steadfast beauty that only the poet can confer. How that works, we will consider below. But so far, the opening quatrains have dislocated a simple expression of love, flipping it into a quandary of transience. Nothing in that opening line tended toward that discussion.

The generalization at the heart of the sonnet is inarguably true:

For the poet, the inevitability of decline is a source of anguish, and some sublime verses. Above, I quoted the sonnet 18 "problem statement," with the solution waiting in the wings, discussed later in this chapter. Many sonnets divide like 18, with a problem probed and then a solution with its elaboration. Problems and solutions fit together organically, but it can be useful to consider the problems independently of their solutions. If the problems cohere, we find some conceptual clarity in the series that may not be apparent in isolated poems.

Approximately fifty sonnets produce examples of time's corruption it its grim variety. Frequently the decline of the beloved is the theme, as in the problem statement in 12:

The elegiac sadness of this poem equally suffuses the poet's self-regard, as in, for example, the beautiful sonnet 73, That time of year thou may'st in me behold. Interwoven in the sequence are increasingly general descriptions of time's manifold doom. Here is the problem again, the body of sonnet 60:

Q1 compares the endless succession of minutes to the endless succession of waves, already a bleak image of sequent toil. Although it gets nowhere, each wave hastens to its end, as if each minute is already a little death. These are not some abstract externalized units of time, but instead the impersonal waves are us: our minutes. The overall effect, however, is temporal compression. Any wave takes a few seconds at most to overtake that which goes before; to compare a minute to a process experienced in a second or two is to accelerate the minute to a fantastic extent.

The first quatrain fast forwards time, and the second redoubles the acceleration of the first:

Q1 imagined minutes; Q2 imagines a whole life. A baby is born, learns to crawl, and reaches maturity in two lines. The glory of maturity is of no duration: the moment of crowning is the moment of crooked eclipse. Everything so quickly won is just as quickly dissolved. Metaphorically, the tragic rise and fall of life is locked into the cycle of the sun. The main of light shines on the process of growth, but no sooner fulfilled, the sun is eclipsed. To compress a whole life into a day is already to squeeze it. A sunset might have rounded out the metaphor. But instead, maturity is dimmed by the even more accelerated darkness of eclipses, and moreover they are crooked, skewing the crown of life's noon. Eclipses actively fight against maturity. It all began in Time, and relentlessly and breathlessly the gift of life itself is confounded. In other sonnets (e.g. 7), the arc of a life is likened to the rise and set of the sun, but this quatrain is the nucleus of compression and acceleration.

As with our other examples, the poem moves toward maximum generality in the third quatrain:

The crooked eclipses fought against crowning maturity, and now they win: the graveyard shapes the images of Q3. Action and agency shift from humanity (as nativity in Q2) to Time. First, the flourish of youth is stopped dead. Then Time carves out the parallel wrinkles in a youthful forehead, delving as if digging in the earth. Once time occupies those trenches, it feeds on what is rare in nature. Physical decay erodes all. Line 12 draws the conclusion of these three examples, each itself an argument by analogy:

Everything that stands — in every sense of stands — will be cut down. In the examples sampled so far, undefeated decay infects human life in all its manifestations. The poet, however, is painfully aware that the powers he has depicted are total. Sonnet 65 might serve as his cumulative keening lament, echoing the images from the examples above:

I have vivisected several sonnets in order to isolate Shakespeare's treatment of a single abstract concept. In all the problem statements, we see the same polyphonic genius of 129, The expense of spirit…. The poet moves feelingly from particulars to generalizations, and from the concrete to the abstract. The poetic gears of these poems could occupy their own book (and have: See Vendler or Booth, for example). But woven into the poetry is also a reflective presentation of a specific problem, which I've displayed as a problem of philosophy. In Shakespeare's treatment, time's losses are more than a conventional trope of love poetry. The decay of all is a real issue, and confronts us still after the book is closed for the day. It certainly exercised the poet of the sonnets, filling one in three sonnets with this particular lament. The imagery is diverse, but the mood is always dark.

Shakespeare proposes two broad solutions to the problem. Nowhere does he reject one in favor of another, and there is no need to seek a single Shakespearean conclusion, as the pleasure and value of this poet is in the capacity to occupy multiple viewpoints simultaneously. He encourages that capacity in ourselves, a way of thinking that undergirds love and ethics alike. That's his humanism, and his vast but subtle influence on the Western world view has made his humanism into the paradigm of all humanisms. Nonetheless, the ideas percolating through the sonnets are related in sense as well as sound and image. There's logic to their interplay, and plenty of evidence that Shakespeare was aware of the internal implications of the series. The ideas, as we have seen, are often abstract, and are readily deployed in our lives and world. Establishing their truth or falsity is a project of existential urgency.

Shakespeare's first reply to Time is exemplified in the couplet completing sonnet 12 (When I do count the clock that tells the time):

The first seventeen sonnets of the series ring the changes on one solution: Reproduce! Accordingly, the group has been called the procreation sonnets. While love poetry often aims at the act of reproduction, the mutual coupling the speaker and his beloved is not the poet's goal. Rather, the male poet wants the beloved to beget a son. Many critics have puzzled over the motivation for this, an odd thing to urge on one's beloved outside of a relationship. Indeed, it is especially altruistic of the poet to prescribe this for his young man, even though its fulfillment entails that the beloved will have sexual relations with, and marry, a third party.

The relentless obsession with time is especially vehement in the procreation sonnets: all but two (8 and 17) include vivid reminders of time's tyranny. The inevitability of decay is the steady premise of fifteen different arguments for procreation, all of which must somehow evade a fundamental non sequitur: Decay will destroy one's physical self whether one breeds or not. Thus the procreation sonnets have a double task. They must reconstrue personal survival or preservation in such a way that procreation does indeed address the devouring vortex of time; and they have to persuade the beloved that this model of preservation is worth pursuing.

It is assumed that time will undo the beloved, but the explicit loss, repeated in thirteen sonnets, is his beauty. In all cases, beauty is the physical beauty possessed by the young man, visible in the beloved's face and especially in his eyes. This will fade — or will it? Various metaphors convert reproduction into something else. Sonnet 13 busily deploys most of them:

The 1609 quarto always splits "yourself" into "your self." It's usually most sensible to take it as the single pronoun "yourself," but not always. In 13, the first line might be heard with extra emphasis: O, that you were YOUR self! That is, if only you alone could control your own destiny. But (the poem continues) you are your own only as long as you live. So (line 3) prepare for the coming end. In line 4, the hedge against the coming end is defined:

Resemblance is also the mechanism of beauty's preservation in sonnets 3, 9, and 11. The current sonnet then introduces another idea that runs through the procreation poems:

Resemblance, your sweet form, will erase the end date (determination) of that beauty which you hold in lease. Once the lease on beauty becomes endless, then you can indeed possess your self; this will endure even after yourself's decease. The image of the short term lease of beauty we recognize from 18 (Shall I compare thee), where summer's lease hath all too short a date. In sonnet 4, beauty is a loan from nature. More*

Q3 introduces another model of survival, the dynastic:

One husbands one's house by becoming an honorable husband. The dynasty and its mansion stand up to winter, and to that other winter too, the barren rage of death's eternal cold.

The dynastic argument might seem to be the most plausible and persuasive, especially if we assume, as all the critics do, that the beloved is an aristocrat.⁷ Yet the poet makes little of this reasoning and barely mentions marriage. A triptych of parents and child inhabit an elaborate image of strings in harmony in sonnet 8, but elsewhere the poet slights marriage in comparison to his main intent, that the beloved get going at begetting. Sonnet 3 includes these lines:

The farmer/husband tills the unear'd womb — unear'd meaning "not yet bearing corn," i.e., not yet fruitful. The term also has an obsolete meaning of "unploughed." Two other sonnets, 5 and 6, fantasize reproduction as an asexual extraction of the essence of beauty, like the distillation of perfume from roses. Here is the first quatrain of 6:

Disdaining the appeals to domestic and familial fulfillment, the poet instead appeals repeatedly to the vanity of beloved. The beloved owes it to the world to spread his loveliness around; failing to do so is selfish and dishonorable. Breeding will preserve him in his image, form, semblance, or copy (refs*). All these are appeals to a narcissistic and infantile desire to extend oneself without limits. The beloved, as Shakespeare has projected him onto the page, is the self-regarding beauty at the center of a solipsistic universe of gratification.

Feel like making a baby? The arguments in the procreation poems are weak inducements to be sure. Shakespeare or the poet-persona of the sonnets perceived their weakness, a weakness apparent in the vacillating premises deployed to move the young man. After a few of the procreation sonnets, the reader is likely to feel that there has to be another way. And of course there is. Beyond sonnet 17 the poet's love for the young man continues, and the problem of time only intensifies. A second response to time gathers itself, which will emerge as a central philosophical position in the sonnets. But the procreation poems have made a first move which will become crucial to Shakespeare's philosophy: Time destroys persons, but the poet takes a step back from the problem of personal death and loss. What makes time awful is not that it delivers us to death; rather, time is the engine of decay, visible in change at every scale. Decay attacks everything, but among the wreckage of persons and their projects, one universal consequence is most tragic: Decay destroys beauty. The procreation sonnets have refocused the horror of time onto a single property that can be abstracted from its hosts. The battle against Time will be fought on the field of beauty, in all its manifestations.

This shift toward a property of entities is at the same time a shift away from the bearer of the property. As a corollary to Shakespeare's abstraction we can detect a porousness and fluidity in the integrity and individuality of persons, beginning with the beloved. In sonnet 6, for example, procreation yields more than a semblance of the beloved; rather, he is urged to breed another thee (6.7). Or why not ten mini-thees?

Immortality in Western imagination is almost universally the deathlessness of the individual, attainable only by magic and miracle: the fountain of youth, the philosopher's stone, the resurrection of the dead. (Marlowe's Dr. Faustus saw it thus.) Magic and miracle never solve anything in Shakespeare.⁸ In particular, no one in Shakespeare ever looks forward to personal immortality. The poet of the procreation sonnets finds immortality in cloning, and sidles up to the idea that replicating one's specific worldly beauty is the best and only eternal life. Replication replaces identity, or conversely, identity survives change, or even transformation.

This reorientation clears a space for the poet to intervene more directly in the war with Time. Among the procreation sonnets, three introduce the poet's interest in poetry itself. Beautiful sonnet 15 is worth reading in its entirety:

Everything grows and withers beneath a cheering and jeering audience of stars. At home among the procreation sonnets, this one tends toward the recommendation that the beloved plant a new self. Thus the popping first-person pronoun in the last line is a surprise: I engraft you new. The poet-speaker, not the beloved himself, will graft a new you onto or into the metaphorical biosphere of the poem. The next sonnet again urges the beloved to breed, but explicitly compares the power of biological reproduction to the capacity of the poet's verse for representing the beloved. Offspring, says the poet, will be better than poetry to keep the beloved living in posterity (6.12).

Then in sonnet 17, the topic is entirely the poet's verse. The speaker imagines future readers of his praise of the beloved:

In short, no one in that dim future will believe the poet's accurate rendering of the marvelous young man. The couplet of 17 now fully equates two creative processes:

Thus ends the campaign for procreation. Now the poet proclaims his own power to preserve the beloved. Above, we looked at the problem statement of next sonnet, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Here is the remaining sestet, the proposed solution to Time:

The poet's brag that his or her lines to time will last forever is one of the oldest boasts of art, and at work in the sonnet tradition. But in all cases Shakespeare takes his source material farther than his predecessors, and this is no exception. In the sonnets, the Shakespearean stretch is intellectual. We've seen two innovations. The first is the anguished realization of the totality and inevitability of decay. The second is the isolation of beauty as the central loss to Time's rage. The first raises the stakes for the immortality of poetry: it must survive the decline of everything else. The second may provide a way for this poet to pull off the metaphysical magic demanded by the first. We'll consider each in turn.

Just how triumphant is the poet's verse? According to 55, very:

The post-apocalyptic triumph of the beloved, who shall pace forth from the flaming ruins of civilization, rests on something surprisingly slight:

The contrast between ends and means begs the question, just how will poetry accomplish its victory against the sluttish time (55.4)? The procreation sonnets repeatedly thrust devouring time in the face of the beloved. He can survive — provided the referent of "thou" loosens to encompass entities that carry forward his youthful beauty. That abstracted immortality now rests with the poet's verse, as in the couplets of 17 and 18, above, and also sonnets 55, 81, and 107. The other survivor is the poet himself. In 107, the images of doom foretold and lamented limits return, including the confining lease and the mortal moon. But in this case poetry has outlasted all uncertainties, to realize a balmy time when the beloved will keep his youthful looks, and much more:

Sure, it's hyperbolic. "I love you forever" is often how a deep impulse of love bursts into words. It's plausible that the sonnets are saying just this, but beautifully. If so, then Shakespeare has no desire to make his exclamations true. On the other hand, perhaps the truth did matter. The sonnets work with ideas no less than sound. They enact a reflective struggle, and Shakespeare is correct in his assessment of time, a conclusion he expresses repeatedly and urgently. Once that truth is granted, one is entitled to enlist Shakespeare for an escape — if any escape is possible.

The sonnets make the same claim for the beloved and the poet, namely, continuing existence through verse. In one respect, they have already failed. No historical individual can claim the sonnets as his or her epitaph. We have no certainty about who the beloveds are, and even with a definite identification, the features sketched in the sonnets are sparse and vague. Many suppose that the poet speaking in the poems is Shakespeare himself. But that identification is probably a mistake, like identifying the playwright with the words of Polonius or Macbeth. Moreover, neither the beloved nor the speaker condense into delineated characters. As noted, the sonnets deliberately evade the concrete dramatic constructs of Laura, Astrophil, Stella, and Delia, let alone Romeo or Rosalind. Instead, the poems repeatedly shift from particular sparks toward the general and abstract. In all these ways, the referents of the sonnets move away from particular relationships, and the psychology of passion is overlaid with the emotion of philosophical struggle. It is as if Shakespeare is trying to write a philosophical essay but has been artificially confined to the sonnet form.

Since the particular referents are nowhere to be found, the sonnets will need another path to truth. The sonnets, especially the time sonnets, have two curious features. The first is repeated self-reference. If the adversary of Time is poetry, then the very poems in which this is stated exemplify it. Sometimes a sonnet will refer specifically to itself: these black lines (63); you live in this (18) ; in black ink my love may still shine bright (65) more*. Often, the sonnets will refer to the poet's verse in general, where the particular sonnet is understood as an example. Refs*

However, notwithstanding the black ink, the vehicle of preservation is not merely the artifact, the papers yellow'd with their age (17.9).⁹ The love texts require the collaboration of readers. For example:

Continued existence, in short, requires that the sonnets be enacted, either in the reader's mind, or aloud. In other words, each sonnet is a performance. The claim of immortality is thus conditional: the sonnets will live only so long as they find actors, that is, readers apt for contemplating the sense of each sonnet, agents willing to board Shakespeare's "fast ride through the psychological universe of passion," as Vendler puts it. If we take the poems seriously, they live.

The immortality of the sonnets thus becomes an empirical question. Will they last until the last syllable of recorded time? So far, so good. One could also make self-referentiality into an ontological argument, that is, an argument that turns on a statement about existence. (The famous example is Anselm's "ontological argument" for the existence of God.) Consider this sentence:

Sentence A exists — there it is, on the page. Now, for the sake of argument, entertain the denial of A:

This proposition cannot be asserted without self-contradiction, since to say or write A` presupposes that the words that express A` exist. So A` is false whenever it is or might be asserted, which is to say, A` is simply false. Therefore A (the negation of A`) is true as an outcome of logical compulsion. A is not simply a contingent observation, but a necessary truth. Furthermore, if it is necessary now, it will be necessary tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow). As soon as A is uttered, its truth is both necessary and eternal.

However, the claim of the sonnets is not just that they will endure as potential verbal performances, but that they will carry love's payload: the poet, the poet's enduring love, and most important, the beloved himself or herself. No ontological footwork can help with this. The sentence, These words and Kalamazoo, too, exist, offers no existential hope for Kalamazoo. The sonnets often refer to the beloved (both young man and dark lady) in the third person, leaving them among the contingent and transient. But a second curious feature of the sonnets leads to a different result. That is Shakespeare's use of pronouns. "You" and "I," "this," "here," etc. are what philosophers call indexicals, words whose referents depend on the situation in which they are uttered. When critics search for the young man and the dark lady of the sonnets, they assume that Shakespeare is speaking in his own voice to specific individuals. However, Shakespeare's steadfast evasion of specific reference suggests that that is not his intent. Instead, the existence of the sonnets overleaps their real author to locate itself in the minds, and voices, of readers. If that is the case, who then is "thou"? The steadfast answer is: It depends. Like any other indexical statement, a sonnet between "I" and "thee" alters its meaning in different conditions of utterance. The speech act of each sonnet is available to me in two ways: I can quote it, or I can use it. The critics bracket the sonnets in quotation marks, in which case I and thou are triangulated around Shakespeare or the created persona of the poet, a fictive author writing to a fictive subject. Or I can look across the picnic blanket, catch the gaze of a potential lover, and say, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? (For picnics, this is preferred to The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.) On that balmy afternoon, I use the words of the poem. The sonnet is my utterance, and even if I preface my recital with, "As Shakespeare says…," I can mean what I say. In that case thou art unambiguous and existent, sitting beside me on that picnic blanket.

The soulful (and cheesy) quotation of whole sonnets is probably rare these days, but shorter chunks of Shakespeare are quoted, with meaningful intent, all the time. English is full of Shakespearean coinages, phrases, and aphorisms. The footnotes of attribution have fallen away, but the words remain. Thou shalt carry on:

Of course it is possible to quote any author and mean it, and thereby shift all your indexicals to new referents. Moreover, self-reference and the second-person pronoun are standard in the sonneteers toolbox. But Shakespeare's sonnets, I've argued, are especially suited to meaningful reenactment. We can identify ourselves in them not because we empathize with the fraught emotions of the lover-poet — these depend on cultural and psychological attitudes that may or may not be shared across time and space. Rather, we identify ourselves with them as we recognize that Shakespeare has raised real problems, problems for us, here and now. On reflection, we recognize that time is indeed the personally and globally destructive force described by Shakespeare. At that moment, Shakespeare's impulse and the reader's coincide. What follows for both reader and poet is the difficult process of working it out. The poetry guides our reflection. It speaks for us, although in a language that is remote from the buzz of everyday thought, language used ingeniously to express ideas and emotions simultaneously. We think along with Shakespeare, and thus participate in his end run past time and death.

Part of the pleasure of these poems is the metaphysical tremor that fractures experience across time. Self-reference and indexicality nets the sense of the poems, and throws it into the reader's universe. The poet, c. 1595, is you. Meanwhile, Time really does destroy all. Shakespeare has perhaps gone as far as one can in opposition. His partial success has drawn on a subtle dismantling of personal identity. After immersion in the sonnets, you no longer feel quite so rooted in the timeline of your life so far, nor so attached to the particulars of your character and physique. Rather, through you flows a shifting constellation of mental and emotional states. These states are rootless, and are leased to you without determination. That is, they can be renewed whenever the poem is engaged in a reader's or speaker's mind, and thus they are exempt from time. Regarding the poetry, so long as readers can enact the poems, so long lives this.

Would Shakespeare agree with this interpretation of his own sonnets? One poem in the sequence takes on a new meaning, sonnet 116:

The poet's relationship to the beloved is threatened. Against this the poet abstracts himself and the beloved into a marriage of true minds. This is the only occurrence of "marriage" in the sonnets, but the word is appropriate for the steadfastness celebrated in the poem. A marriage of true minds, however, suggests that the poet means something other than the church institution, once again a more abstract rendering of experience than marriage alone. Love implicates both lovers, but the metaphors no longer fit the emotion of love, nor sexual passion, so often a tempest for the poet. Instead, this love is the star to every wandering bark, which alters not with the passing of time. The couplet abruptly returns to the speaker, in the writer's role. For emphasis the poet makes another poetic ontological argument. If the poet is wrong about love, then he never writ, nor no man ever loved. But he did write, and love too. The writing is in the reader's hands, being the poem itself. So the consequent is denied, implying that the if-clause is false, this, the claims of the poem, cannot be error and upon me proved. The couplet reattaches the words of the poem to the speaker, and through self-reference simultaneously justifies both his emotional state and his intellectual rationale.

Here love is located outside of time, a very popular sentiment among lovers. But it's unusual among the sonnets. Shakespeare is generally careful around Time, making his grab for existence dependent on actors and agents, while in this sonnet Love is impersonal. Moreover, in the other sonnets the only constant is change, while here the theme is an ever-fixed mark, which never alters when it alteration finds. This coheres with the series only if we allow Love to exist apart from lovers. Ultimately, the unfixing of personal identity allows exactly that. With that in mind, the poet can be serene toward the occasion of the poem, a response to the alteration love encounters when a remover attempts to bend and destroy it. The discourse on Love serves as his justification for his equanimity. It would be a weak rationalization, not worthy of the fierce honesty of Shakespeare's psychology, if not for the shakeup of identity that runs through so many of the poems.

Within these fourteen line suites of thrusts and parries, and through many variations among the series, a pattern of thought emerges. Its development is ruminative, as each poem starts again from a new beginning. Frequently the starting point is an emotionally loaded object of contemplation. The themes are hot sometimes as contingent problems (love's setbacks) and sometimes as implacables (time), but each is construed as a problem of thought as well as emotion. In the sonnet tradition, problems tend to be externalized (e.g. the flinty heart of the mistress), and the poems beseech the beloved to behave or feel differently toward the speaker, an external solution to an external problem. In Shakespeare's sonnets, problems resolve (if they do) in the mind of the poet. As observed above, Shakespeare's poems move toward abstract, general concepts. Sonnet 116, Let me not to the marriage of true minds, is the apex of this process, with an idea of love that stabilizes beyond the impediments that so many other poems document.

Elsewhere in philosophy we read of a reflective ascent to the apprehension of abstract concepts, ideas that are completely stable, impersonal, untouched by the world of change. That is, of course, the process and outcome of philosophy for Plato, described in the Symposium, among other dialogues. Like Shakespeare, Plato describes the ascent from the stormy particulars of personal passion to a serene contemplation of abstract Ideas, which are nonetheless real objects. Indeed, the Ideas of Plato are the foundation of Being overall, as sensible objects in this world are all flawed copies of this transcendent formal perfection. To the student of Socratic dialectic, a Platonic Idea is the star to every wandering bark.

This analogy leads directly to Shakespeare's unknown bookshelf: Did he read Plato? Scholars converge on a decisive "We don't know." He might have; some of Plato had been translated into Latin, French, and Italian, but not English. However, even if the Symposium lay on his bedside table, we could not be certain that its ideas suffuse his poetry. To confirm any influence, we turn to the works. A diligent search of all of Shakespeare and all of Plato yields many parallels, in details and in big ideas too. But nowhere in Shakespeare do we read "As Plato says…". Nowhere do we find Shakespeare borrowing from Plato, that is, lifting some patch of Plato in the recognizable, obvious ways he borrows from Ovid, Holinshed, and many others.

In the absence of clear lines of influence, in aligning Shakespeare and Plato we risk distortion due to a powerful confirmation bias. That is, we look for cases of similarity, of which there are many… swimming in a sea of dissimilarities ignored. We risk deriving a Platonised Shakespeare, a clever parrot of a dead Athenian. This distortion leads to a distorted reading of Shakespeare's methods of composition, as we imagine the poet's task to be reforging a set of ideas from Plato. At the end of this road, Shakespeare is fully subordinated to Plato, joining the list of Platonic philosophers like Plotinus, Ficino, the Oxford Platonists, etc. Alfred North Whitehead famously said that the European philosophical tradition is "a series of footnotes to Plato." Shakespeare's thought could mingle among the footnotes, even if his poetry is praised beyond all others.

The main claim of this book is that Shakespeare, an original poet and unique dramatist, is an original thinker as well. Finding his originality is a challenge. As we've seen in the sonnets, aspects of argument are fragmentary and scattered. The reasoning in the text is "non-linear," unlike other famous philosophical works but quite like the tumble of reflection in real time. Argument in Shakespeare is not rationalization created to buttress a preconceived conclusion, but rather discovery of ideas, and a constant testing of the waters, one dip after another. The readers "aha" of comprehension is multiplied and never quite final. This chapter's hopscotch will be typical of our path through other works as well. Shakespeare the philosopher works in ways that have no analogue in the Western canon, to develop specifically Shakespearean ideas that also break loose from more recognizable doctrines.

Thus when Plato or any other philosopher is invoked, we should look for divergence between the two thinkers. For diverge they do. Ultimately, Plato is a better foil than father of Shakespearean thinking. Plato leaves behind exactly what Shakespeare most treasures: particularity, passion, and their combinations. For Plato, particulars are incomplete and degraded examples from which philosophy starts — and ends, for the weak-minded. Ultimately abstractions replace particulars in thought, and the philosopher's greatest joy is the pure intellective apprehension of abstract ideas, the more abstract the better. Being, the Good, and Beauty are the tops. Also for Plato, emotions are disturbing states shared with animals and plants, and likewise to be sloughed off as the mind turns heavenward. Finally, for Plato the orientation toward reason and the abstract is truth (for him), enjoying his full conviction and urged on his readers with a battery of different arguments.

For Shakespeare the particular is never eclipsed by the general. His is a universe of sensory particulars and abstract particulars as well. That is, a concept like lust can be discussed as if it were a particular instance of lust, rather than a general term referring to many instances of the concept. And vice versa — particulars can symbolize concepts without losing their singularity. For example, in 73, the poet evokes a stage of life which might be hard to put into prosaic language. He does so with very specific images:

Line 2 enacts a tripletake: Behold the yellow leaves, but no, there are none, but look again, there are still a few — see them hanging in the cold wind. Like 129, each line expands and modifies what came before. Its first sentence might have ended with line 3, Upon those boughs which shake against the cold. Line 4 is thus a sky-opening surprise, looking up toward the bare cold branches, but also seeing in them the ruined vaults of a slighted chapel, its songbird choirs silenced. The imagery situates the speaker in a precise sensory environment, shivering in a cold wind and looking up at branches arching overhead. This concrete environment epitomizes late autumn, but that in turn points to a time in the poet's life, a condition that thou mayest in me behold. By invoking the perceptual experience of the beloved, it becomes sweetly ambiguous who is experiencing the forlorn scene: the poet; the beloved; and, via Shakespeare's metaphorical alchemy, us. Q2 and Q3 each create new scenes (twilight, then ashes in the hearth), refining both the poet's self-understanding and the beloved's perception of the poet's current standpoint on the downslope of life. The speaker's decline is the subject, at an amorphous moment that is hard to define. The rich sensory realism of the poem makes the amorphous both physically and emotionally specific.

The implicit logical hierarchy presupposed in Greek philosophy, with its distinction between sensed individual items and cognized general concepts, does not exist in Shakespeare's imagination. Shakespeare's world is flat, or perhaps more accurately, relations of conceptual superordination and subordination bounce about in all directions, shifting at all times. His words can be utterly concrete but freighted with general implications; conversely, his generalities have the concrete force and agency of blunt objects. In this protean conceptual world, emotions likewise flow. General concepts are just as hot as fully realized particulars, and the poet's goal is to voice these emotions, not to bury them. For most philosophy, the text is a final product achieved at the end of long reflection. The false starts, roadblocks, disorder, and repetition of the thought process itself disappear into a crafted edifice. For Shakespeare, the artistry enshrines the process, not the product, through a unique mimesis that installs the poet's thinking in the reader/speaker of the poetry. As reflection in action, no finality emerges to end the process, and no stable hierarchy awaits to fit the pieces.

Lacking finality, it may appear that there is no doctrine, no positive view. But that is not so. The poet addresses at least one very real problem, Time, and offers a solution. The solution rests on several ideas that are the subject of poetic variations in many sonnets. The first of these ideas are metaphysical, a view about what, fundamentally, exists. Shakespeare is a realist, broadly speaking. There is, for him, a reality outside of one's individual perception. Moreover, in this reality some entities are more fundamental. These are not individuals (persons or objects), nor undifferentiated matter (or substance), but rather concrete properties that are multiply instantiated in the world. Foremost among these is beauty, a property which is both lost and regained in the passionate reflections of the poet.

These real properties of the Shakespearean world are in continual flux. A second facet of Shakespearean metaphysics explains how these properties change. There are natural forces, like time, and there are the makers of transitory monuments, erected and eroded both in the past and in times to come. Shoulder to shoulder with these, however, we find the creative agency of writers, readers, and speakers. The words of the poet conjure a real property, and those same words reconjure the same reality with each utterance. That is, for Shakespeare reality is, at least in part, a creation of performance. A short, temporary name for this metaphysical complex will be performative realism.

"Performative realism" sounds like an oxymoron. Indeed, it is alien to modern scientific realism. Nowadays reality is unmoved by what we think and say. Performance is without ontological force. It is likewise alien to the antithesis of scientific realism, postmodernism, in which the text is the thing and the only thing is the text. Shakespearean texts have power outside of themselves, once they occupy the eyes, breath, and mouths of agents. The ideas of performative realism may even have been alien in Shakespeare's time, which is to say that Shakespeare was not only a philosopher, but a uniquely original one.

If the sonnets had been all that survived of Shakespeare's works, the assumptions comprising performative realism would be conjectures only. Missing from the sonnets are explicit discussions of the metaphysics they seem to presuppose. That is, notwithstanding the preeminent obligations to poetry, from a philosopher we'd hope to find explicit exploration of big questions like What is real? and How do we know? We'd also look for subordinate consideration of the reality of specific broad categories of entities, like selves, minds, fate, etc. The sonnets don't answer this need. Nonetheless they provide a strong impression of Shakespeare's method, beginning and ending in multiple perspectives, leaving it to us to construct their convergence.

What sort of writing might work out these big ideas? It would be writing at greater length, to allow specific ideas to ripen and find application in concrete situations. It would provide opportunities for multiple perspectives where each perspective could be developed in itself and in interaction with other perspectives. It would offer illustrations of the collision of ideas and the real world, especially the social world. It would carry forward the probing enactive psychological dynamics already apparent in the sonnets. It would, we hope, sustain the sheer beauty that animates the poems we've considered.

What genre of writing could possibly accomplish all this?